From ”Poet” to ”Politics”: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Radical Cultural Criticism in the Second Series Essays

Although R.W. Emerson and the American Romantics at large wrote at the beginning of American capitalism, they have a profound understanding of the problems of alienation and reification in a society that fails to address human individualism and creativity. The seminar will discuss key essays by Emerson and their often paradoxical embeddedness between American utopianism and cultural criticism. On a second level, the seminar will address the relevance of this cultural criticism for our own postindustrial, pandemic age.

We will use the inexpensive and widely available edition Library of America Paperback Classics: R.W. Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series. A hardcopy of the text is required.